this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Anyone from BC with context on why the cons have caught up with the BC NDP?
BC United (the current opposition!) basically collapsed and stopped running. This means that there won't be vote splitting between them and the BC Conservatives.
It's fucking bizarre... but you need to remember that the interior is conservative as fuck and BC basically has Canada's bible belt.
The BC interior is weird: they spend so much of their political lives as the little brother to the economic powerhouse at the population centers that they're easily swayed by "Victoria isn't listening and Vancouver isn't sharing its pork" rhetoric, which is really how BC people see Ottawa and Ontario : Ottawa and Toronto don't know us and don't care. They're really ripe for a "white guy endangered by immigrant" kind of mild hate as well, which makes the emo like three layers deep.
So they're going to vote single-issue protectionism/isolationism and they'll accept any amount of human rights abuses and xenophobia if they can get it, effectively forgetting they didn't even get that from vanderzalm.
They'll believe any lie about American-style healthcare savings them money because they're voting for some fairy tale about recognition, job protection, and magical wealth that comes from "Vancouver taking notice" and "Ottawa taking notice" and other rebellious-teen themes.
This makes sense if you relabel the BC Conservatives on that graph as BC Liberals. It’s really just a story about the Liberals.
The BC Liberals were one of the major BC political parties. Despite the name, they had no relationship with the federal Liberal party. The BC party was significantly more to the right compared to the federal party. As a result, they captured a ton of centre and almost all of the right-leaning votes. This went on for decades.
Once the BC Liberals got defeated by the NDP, some weird stuff started happening. First they renamed their party from the BC Liberal Party to the BC United Party. This is almost certainly only because Justin Trudeau’s approval rating started sliding, and the BC party wanted to avoid getting a bad rep by name association.
Then they discovered that their existing leadership was actually super unlikable, and MLAs started declaring they would run as independents. Some outright declared for the BC Conservatives (who were, up until this point, a fringe party that didn’t win seats). That created some momentum and more MLAs started jumping ship.
BC United finally collapsed a couple of weeks ago. The party is effectively dead and I don’t think they’re even trying to win any seats next time around.
The situation is analogous to a local burger shop getting bought out and replaced by a Wendy’s. You could ask why Wendy’s is all of a sudden so popular, but the answer has less to do with Wendy’s being popular and more to do with them serving similar food as a previous burger joint, and since they’re in the same location, the same customers keep coming in.
Even in that context it doesn't make any sense. BC saw how badly the BC Liberals fucked everything up for a decade+ they were in power due to their corruption for corporate interests and kicked them to the curb. Now we have a government that is actually trying to fix important things like housing costs, healthcare, and the environment yet the people are saying "Nah, we would prefer what conservative governments in other provinces are doing to make services worse by privatizing them. "
I get that people are unhappy with their decline of quality of life, but we know from looking elsewhere that a Conservative government is not the solution that helps most people.
I know people who will vote the conservative ticket solely because they’re still mad about the BC NDP of the 90s having a bunch of scandals. The “never NDP” crowd are a mirror of the “never Liberal”/“never Conservative” crowd.
When people make up their minds on something and build up a bunch of emotional insulation around it, they’re never going to budge on their position. Their egos can’t allow it. It’s like a slightly less pathetic version of the polarization in US federal politics.
My dad is like that. He still doesn't trust the NDP and thinks they'd mess up as bad as they did back then. He instead votes Libertarian...
Most of the media are owned by alt-right fascists. This might have a lot to do with it.